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 Illustration by Jason Prentice Ahlquist |
By John Shirley 1st Cecily's Mom was in even more of a hurry than usual. She had to take Cecily to her tumbling class, and pick Eddy up at Soccer, and then pick up Daddy at the airport. Daddy was always on his way to the airport or coming from it, and sometimes they had "time with him" at the airport itself, when he was there between flights. He was a Franchise Set Up Specialist; she didn't know what that was, except that it meant he had to crisscross the country, occasionally just passing through the town he lived in. But he was going to be here for Thanksgiving. He said he would play Monopoly with her, on Thanksgiving. Driving the Ford SUV down Burberry Street, Mom was spindling the little hook of auburn hair that followed the curve of her face and pointed at her chin, which was pointy also, and there was another hook of hair pointing from the other side of her face, so that was three points, Cecily decided; also the point of mom's sharp noise: four. Mom's blue eyes, though, were soft and far away; they didn't exactly look at anything. Her gaze was passing over the Palo Alto cul de sacs and palm trees and spouting sprinklers on big green lawns, but never seemed to fix on anything. Not quite thinking these things, Cecily was riding beside her Mom, proud that she was old enough to do that now, it was legal and everything. "You have your Creative Crafts class on Sunday," Mom said. "Remind me of that so I don't forget to take you." |
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"'Kay." But Cecily resolved to forget to remind Mom, because she'd rather stay home and watch cartoons, and Yancy might come over and play Barbies. "There's where my teacher said her sister lives," Cecily said, pointing at a side street. "She told me that when I told her where I lived." "Huh yeah?" Adults never seemed interested in things like that. But Cecily thought it was interesting. There was something bloody in the road, up ahead. It was moving. "Mom-oh!--what's that?" Mom's sort of looked and her gaze flicked away. "A squirrel." "It's sick. Can we help it?" "What? No. It was hit by a car." "So what, we could help it." "It's not going to live, Cecily. It was hit by a car. It was in the road." "It's still moving. It's trying to get out of the road. There was blood." "It was in the road. Things get hit." She turned on the radio, the K-Lite station, which meant she didn't want to talk anymore. Cecily looked out the back window but couldn't see the squirrel anymore; they'd gone around a curve and left it way behind.  2nd A year later, Cecily went to her friend Yancy's birthday party. Her older brother Eddy went too, sulking the whole time; he didn't want to go to his sister's girlfriend's party with a bunch of girls, but Mom needed him to walk Cecily home afterwards, because she had to go to her support group, and Dad was out of town. At the party, Cecily felt let down. It was all sunny in the backyard and there was crepe twirling overhead and pinata candy and those little party bags full of cool junk to take home, and laughing girls, but Yancy was ignoring her. She hadn't said anything about the present Cecily had given her, she just opened it and went onto the next one, and now she was playing with Kathy and Moira, and hardly looked up when Cecily spoke. I'm supposed to be her best friend, Cecily thought. She went wandering around the house looking for Eddy, to see when they were going home, and couldn't find him for a long time, then heard him yelling, "Whoa! Phat!" from upstairs in Yancy's house. Yancy's half brother, a grown up guy named Vernon, was staying there, because he got kicked out of college and didn't have any place else to go-that's what Yancy said-and Eddy was upstairs in Vernon's room watching Vernon playing a computer game. Vernon had long stringy brown hair and a goatee that was hard to see and skinny arms but a bulging middle. He wore a fading t-shirt that said Id Software on it, beginning to pop out holes along the seams. Eddy, who was thirteen, was perched on the edge of Vernon's bed; Vernon had let the sheets get rumpled onto the floor so there was just a bare mattress. Eddy sat leaning forward, staring over Vernon's shoulder, his buck teeth sticking out of his gaping mouth, twitching every time there was an explosion on the PC screen. For some reason, she thought of the squirrel in the road. She hadn't thought of it in almost a year. "What do you want?" Eddy asked her, not looking away from the computer. He squeezed a pimple as he watched the game; he twitched. "Just to see when we're leaving." Eddy didn't answer her, instead saying to Vernon, "Whoa-you broke the skin." "That's when it gets serious, dude," Vernon said, like he was sneering at Eddy. Then Vernon sucked some air through his clenched teeth, real hard and fast, like he was in pain. She saw that he was in pain-there was a sort of clamp like a miniature bear trap with built-in metal teeth gripping his arm, and there was a wire running from the piston-driven jawlike device to the back of the computer. Whenever Vernon got shot in the game, the spikes clamped down and dug into his arm. Real spikes digging into his real arm. The toothy clamp looked like it was put together with duct tape and wires and little nails ... "The only way to play a killgame," Vernon was saying, "is on the hardest setting-ow, shit!--and with no saves, and with real pain. Then you're not full of shit...you're a real warrior...Shit, they got me..." Her stomach lurched as she watched the toothy clamp convulsively bite down on his arm-with extra force when he was killed. It was like when Aunt Colleen's dog was shaking a dog-toy, growling and grinding it with its teeth. But it was his arm, not some toy, and it was grinding it up into hamburger, and blood was running down his arm, to drip off the elbow onto the rug. "Whoa dude," Eddy said admiringly, as Vernon started the game over again. "You are serious." Then Vernon's step-mom came in, and started yelling at him, so Eddy and Cecily went home. Monday at school, Yancy made up with Cecily, and invited her over after school, and Mom said it was okay as long as she went to her Jazz Dancing class before going to Yancy's, because Mom could pick her up at Yancy's on the way to the airport to get Dad. Going from Yancy's bedroom, where they were dressing Barbies, to the bathroom, Cecily stopped in front of Vernon's partly open bedroom door-there was something she'd seen out of the corner of her eye that made her stop and look. It was the gun in Vernon's hand, one of those shiny silver revolvers. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, with his arm all bandaged up, twirling the revolver on his index finger. Hunched over the twirling gun, staring at it. He stopped twirling the gun, and looked up, and scowled at her; reached out and slammed the door in her face. That night, Cecily couldn't sleep. Her Dad came in to her bedroom to see her; he seemed relieved when she didn't want him to read to her. Him and Mom were having cocktails and watching the Spice channel. She knew it was that because she heard the Spice Channel oh-oh-oh sounds when she went by the bedroom door. "Can't sleep, kiddo?" Dad asked, he was standing by her bed with his hands in pockets, rocking on the balls of his feet. "Dad?" "What?" "Yancy's big brother, Vernon, was playing with a gun today." "Was he? What kind of gun?" "A real gun." "I don't think you'd know a real one from a toy gun. It could've been an air pistol. But then he's old enough to legally have a real gun, too. How was he playing with it?" "Spinning it and looking at it." "So? Guns aren't toys but..." He shrugged. "He had this thing on his arm that chewed it up when he plays computer games. It was all bloody." "I know about those-Eddy bought one from some kid and I took it away." "Vernon's, like, sick or something. He's...I mean..." She didn't know how to explain. She was sure of it, but didn't know how to say it so it sounded real. "Forget it. He's a loser, that boy. Not our problem." "What if....he's going to die." Dad looked out the window; Cecily followed his gaze. The bushes moved in the wind, seemed to nod in agreement with Cecily. "Well, Cecily-there's nothing we can do about it if he's going down. That's his Mom and Dad's problem." "Can't you talk to them?" "I don't know. We'll see." But she knew that meant no way. Dad didn't talk to Vernon's parents. Three months later, Vernon shot himself dead. It was their problem, Dad had said. But they went to the funeral, and at the funeral she heard Vernon's parents say they didn't know the boy was that despondent, and Cecily heard her Dad say "Don't blame yourself, there's no way you could have known." 3rd Two days before Cecily was to graduate from Middle School, she heard that the Harrison and the jock kids were planning something for Goop. Goop was a seventh grader, whose Dad had insisted his boy be allowed to play basketball in the intramural games. He was a whip-thin kid, with a long neck; his posture drooped, and his chin was weak, his eyes really big-"like an alien from the X Files," Harrison said-and he had a tendency to laugh at things no one else laughed at. Mr Conners the English teacher said that Goop, whose real name was Christian Heinz, was "the very imp of unpopularity"; said it laughing and shaking his head. Mr Conners had once gotten in trouble with some lawyer for pulling several tufts of those soft little hairs from the arm of a seventh grader to punish him for talking back. Goop had wanted to try intramural basketball, because he'd been practicing shooting baskets for hours, and they hadn't wanted to let him do it, especially because the Surfers were expecting to win the school trophy against the Shredders, and he would be in the Surfers basketball team because of which PE teacher he had. But Goop's Dad insisted and insisted some more and the Principal spoke to the PE Teacher-- so they let Goop play in Harrison's team: The Surfers. Only, shooting baskets alone is different than shooting them when someone is waving their hands in your face, and in the championship game Goop kept tensing up and missing when he got the ball. But he kept trying, just insisting on trying, when really he should've just hung back and been a guard and stayed out of the way. But "he was, all, trying to prove himself," Yancy said. And he just proved he was still the Goop. Harrison's team lost the school trophy, and it was, anyway, just this stupid little four dollar fake-gold trophy, but Harrison took it really seriously. So, as curious as anyone, Cecily was there, after school, standing in the very midst of a cool June late afternoon. She was waiting, with about thirty other kids, by the small wooden bridge over the creek behind the school; Cecily's big brother Eddy had even come over from the high school to see. The sun came and went and came again through the patchwork of clouds skimming across the sky, as Goop plodded obliviously up the path between the track and the football field, toward the little foot-bridge, carrying his books. He was staring at the ground, as he went, sagging like the books he was carrying had their weight multiplied by his misery. He stopped and stared, just before the bridge, seeing Harrison leaning both forearms on one of the metal, concrete-filled yellow posts that blocked the bridge; the posts were to keep people from driving cars or motorcycles over it. Harrison was a tall kid with bright but empty blue eyes and skin that looked so smooth it was like doll-skin to Cecily-she was having trouble with acne then-and his cheeks were always more red than a boy's cheeks should be. But he was a tall, cute guy, who was good at sports, the hair on the side of his head cut into corn-row patterns, and everybody approved of him. Goop put up a hand to hood his eyes so he could see against the glare; then the sun went behind the cloud and he saw all the kids waiting there, all watching him raptly, many of them grinning. He said, "Okay, I'm stupid, okay." He turned to go back the other way-- turned clumsily, in a hurry, so he dropped some of his books and the papers loosely piled in his binder and they went scattering all over the ground. Everyone laughed. Goop bent over to pick them up. Shaking his head in disbelief -as if he couldn't believe Goop would let himself be that vulnerable now--Harrison set himself athletically on his left foot, poised like a goalkicker, and slammed Goop hard in the tailbone the point of his right Nike high top, and the boy pitched forward onto his face, yelling in pain. "You asshole," Harrison said. "You fucked everybody up." Harrison grabbed Goop by the ankles and dragged him toward the bridge. Goop twisted this way and that like a fish on a hook. Harrison laughed. Cecily got a twisty-tight feeling in her gut. She thought she saw Mr Conners over by the bleachers, picking up some baseball equipment-he had been assistant coach besides teaching English-and she found herself walking over to him, after being careful the others weren't watching her. They weren't taking their eyes off Goop and Harrison. She looked back when she was about halfway and saw that Harrison and two other kids, including her own brother, were kicking something in the grass by the bridge; the other kids starting to get looks of panic, backing away. Mr Conners was only about forty yards off. She was surprised he hadn't noticed anything going on. He was closing a duffelbag when she got there, and looked up, ran his fingers through his thinning, shoulder length brown hair; his crooked smile crooking a little more as he recognized her. "Cecily, isn't it?" "Yeah. Um-I think Harrison's, all, beating up on Goop?" "Goop? Oh-the Heinz kid? They fighting on school property?" "I think it's off school land. It's by the creek. But they're not fighting..." "Well if they're not fighting, what are we talking about?" "Goop's not fighting. Just Harrison. I mean, he's hitting Goop." Conners snorted. "I don't blame him a whole lot. The kid would go on shooting. Trying to show off, when he knew..." "Yeah. I just...But...Harrison's, all, kicking him." "Well, it's not on school property." "'kay." She turned, hesitating, drawn to see what was going on by the bridge-they seemed to be down at the creek now, she could just make out the top of their heads over the grass, because they were all standing on the bank of little stream. But she turned and walked the other way, to get the number 34 bus to the Tae Bo class she was taking with her Mom. It wasn't the slugging or the kicking, really, that did it, she found out, a few weeks later. A friend of Mom's was married to a doctor who'd worked on Goop at the hospital, after the incident at the bridge, and they found out from him: it was the lack of oxygen. Goop had fallen with his head in the water, face down, his body slanting up the bank; his weight holding his head down. He was dazed and weak and not able to get himself out of that odd position. And the kids had left him there, assuming he'd get out. That's what Eddy said. Goop didn't die, though. It was just brain damage. He couldn't remember how to read and write, and he walked almost sideways, after that, and one of his eyes was blind. But it wasn't the hitting, so much as the oxygen loss and the brain cells dying. No one went to jail, but there was some kind of settlement, or something. 4th In a thickly-hot early August, when Cecily was fourteen and a half, she was getting ready to go to her singing lesson, when the thing happened with the Ice Cream man. She was yelling at her Mom, "Mom where's that Mariah Carey songbook? I need it for the lesson!" when her own shout was almost lost in the yelling from the street. For a couple of minutes some part of her mind had noticed that the Ice Cream truck was in the street, or close by: she'd heard the amplified tinkling of the song the truck had played for years now as it cruised slowly through the neighborhood: Yankee Doodle. Like a giant rolling music box, it played Yankee Doodle over and over and over and over, the end looping into the beginning. She'd often wondered how the guys who drove the grubby little white trucks with the stickers on them could stand the same sound going on and on and on for, what, nine hours a day. It would make you into a psychokiller, she thought. But maybe they didn't really hear it after a while. It was annoying enough, anyway, just hearing it drive through the neighborhood, Mom had said once. You heard the song coming, and you heard the song going. What Cecily had noticed, as she was looking through the pile of stuff on the little table in the front hall for the Mariah Carey songbook, was that the song had cut off suddenly. A moment later there was all the yelling. She found the songbook on the floor, leaning up against a table leg, and yelled "Never mind!" at her Mom, and went out to get the bus to her voice lesson, and then she saw all the people in the street gathered around the ice cream truck. It was really hot, and the air conditioners weren't working, because the electric company had shut down their neighborhood for a couple of hours-rolling intentional brownouts due to excessive electricity use in hot weather, it was called-and everyone was sweating and squinting; the heat rippled up from the asphalt. She recognized Mr Farmer, from across the street; the red-faced man who worked on classic cars from down at the dead end; the two Italian sisters who lived together from the split level on the corner; those four college aged boys who liked to sit in their cars and listen to loud hip hop in the driveway; Mr Hinh, the Vietnamese man who owned the liquor store; that fat guy who collected old Harley Davidsons; and two big blond men she didn't know. They were all in a circle around the little Pakistani guy who drove the ice cream truck up and down all day. And there was a seven year old girl with greasy black hair who looked delighted by all the adults yelling. Cecily walked over to see what all the commotion was. Mr Farmer was arguing with some of the others. "I just don't think you should hit him again-" "I'll tell you what," the fat guy in the Harley t-shirt was saying, "this guy and his people have been warned again and again. The kid gives him two dollars for a dollar-fifty ice cream, he gives the kid the ice cream and fifty cents worth of junk candy instead of change-more like ten cents worth, he's calling fifty cents worth. It's stealing from children." "And sometimes," the red faced man chimed in, "he doesn't give any change of any kind. They know the kids won't say anything usually if they just keep the change." "Sure," the taller, gray haired Italian lady said. "They sell this horrible junk that makes sores in the mouth-they did this to my niece, candy that made her sick. And they lie about the change all the time-" Cecily saw, then, that the little Pakistani guy was breathing hard, with a hand pressed to his nose; blood streamed through his fingers. Twice she saw him try to push through the circle of people to get to the truck-twice the men pushed him back against the sticker-covered side of the truck; against Dream Cream stickers and Frozen Three Musketeers Bar stickers and Sweet Tart stickers and Eskimo Pie stickers. "Cocksucker is stealing from children!" the red-faced man shouted. One of the Italian ladies escorted the little girl-who didn't want to leave-away from the truck. The girl went but kept looking back, grinning. She'd complained or something and it'd led to all this, Cecily guessed. "My boss they tell me do this!" the Pakistani guy said, in a piping voice. "They tell me, my Uncles, it is not my truck, they say no change, only candy! I don't steal but they tell me--!" "These people are not honest!" Mr Hinh said, "they deserve to be taught something!" "It is not me-they make me do this! It is my only job!" the little man wailed. "You see, it's a goddamn policy of ripping off kids!" the biker guy said. "Fuck you, pal, you didn't have to go along with it!" And he straight-armed the Pakistani guy against the side of the truck. The Pakistani man gave a high pitched cry of anger and fear and -the action almost spastic-- kicked the biker in the crotch. The big man bellowed in pain and clutched at himself and the Pakistani tried to rush past him, but Mr Hinh tripped the Pakistani and as he fell one of the college boys from down the street brought his knee up sharply into the falling man's throat, so that you could hear cartilage crunching, and he fell choking. The crowd backed away from him, and after a moment began to move off, shaking their heads; except the red faced man and Mr Hinh and the biker; they shouted at the little man, things like "You tell those people we don't want your thieving Paki ass in here anymore!" And the biker, as white faced as the man next to him was flushed, kicked the Pakistani hard, once, in the side of the neck, and then turned and marched away. The others followed, muttering; shrugging. There was just Cecily about thirty feet away from the little man, who was spitting blood, coughing, gurgling. Cecily didn't need to hear her Mom shouting at her to get away from there. She knew what to do. She walked off, on her own, to the bus stop. She'd practiced the Mariah Carey song all week and she thought she had it down. About ten minutes later, as the bus carried her around a corner; she looked back and glimpsed the man lying still in the middle of the road next to his truck. She was surprised to hear no ambulance coming. Mr Farmer had thought about calling it, he told her Mom, but he'd heard you could end up having to pay for the cost of the ambulance if you called. Mom later said she thought that wasn't true, but she wasn't sure. Cecily heard, later, he choked to death on blood. "Huh," Cecily said, when she heard that. 5th Cecily was driving her small blond daughter Shelly to her first Kids Kreative Klass at the Montesori school, on a wet day in February, when Shelly pointed at the small white dog twitching in the road up ahead. "Oh-I'm glad you saw that, hon," Cecily said. "I might not have seen it-" As it was, she was able to drive around it with no trouble. It might've gotten on her tires. "Couldn't we see what's wrong with it?" Shelly asked. "No. Do you want your juice packet? You didn't have any juice for breakfast." "Why not, why can't we?" "Why can't we what?" "See if the dog..." "...It's not our dog. It was in the road. It was just in the road. Do you want this juice or not?" "'kay." They were on time for the class, but Shelly would've preferred to stay home and play videogames. |
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John Shirley is the author of more than 50 short stories and a dozen novels, including City Come a Walkin', Demons and Spider Moon. He was also the driving force behind the screenplay to The Crow. If that weren't enough, he's written teh lyrics to two Blue Oyster Cult albums and fronts his own punk rock band Sado-Nation. We're very happy to welcome him on board the Starship MarsDust. You can learn more about John and his many works HERE. |
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